It is no exaggeration to state that South Korea no longer exists as a country. Its
towns have been destroyed, much of its means of livelihood eradicated, and its
people reduced to a sullen mass dependent upon charity and exposed to
subversive influences. When the war ends no gratitude can be expected from the
South Koreans, but it is to be hoped that the lesson will have been learned that it
is worse than useless to destroy to liberate. Certainly, western Europe would
never accept such a "liberation".55

The worst of the bombing was yet to come. That began in the summer of 1952
and was Washington's way of putting itself in a better bargaining position in the truce
discussions with the Communists, which had been going on for a full year while the
battles raged. The extended and bitter negotiations gave rise to another pervasive
Western beliefâ€”that it was predominantly Communist intransigence, duplicity, and
lack of peaceful intentions which frustrated the talks and prolonged the war.
This is a lengthy and entangled chapter of the Korean War story, but one does
not have to probe too deeply to discover the unremarkable fact that the barriers were
erected by the anti-Communist side as well. Syngman Rhee, for example, was so
opposed to any outcome short of total victory that both the Truman and Eisenhower
administrations drew up plans for overthrowing him;56 which is not to suggest that the
American negotiators were negotiating in the best of faith. The last thing they wanted to
be accused of was having allowed the commies to make suckers of them. Thus it was
that in November of 1951 we could read in the New York Times:

The unadorned way that an apparently increasing number of them [American
soldiers in Korea] see the situation right now is that the Communists have made
important concessions, while the United Nations Command, as they view it,
continues to make more and more demands. ... The United Nations truce team has

53
created the impression that it switches its stand whenever the Communists
indicate that they might go along with it.57

At one point during this same period, when the Communists proposed that a
ceasefire and a withdrawal of troops from the combat line should take place while
negotiations were going on, the United Nations Command reacted almost as if this were
a belligerent and devious act. "Today's stand by the Communists," said the UNC
announcement, "was virtually a renunciation of their previously stated position that
hostilities should continue during armistice talks."58
Once upon a time, the United States fought a great civil war in which the North
attempted to reunite the divided country through military force. Did Korea or China or
any other foreign power send in an army to slaughter Americans, charging Lincoln with
aggression?
Why did the United States choose to wage full-scale war in Korea? Only a year
earlier, in 1949, in the Arab-Israeli fighting in Palestine and in the India-Pakistani war
over Kashmir, the United Nations, with American support, had intervened to mediate an
armistice, not to send in an army to take sides and expand the fighting. And both these
conflicts were less in the nature of a civil war than was the case in Korea. If the US/UN
response had been the same in these earlier cases, Palestine and Kashmir might have
wound up as the scorched-earth desert that was Korea's fate. What saved them, what
kept the US armed forces out, was no more than the absence of a communist side to the
conflict.

6. Albania 1949-1953
The proper English spy

"To simultaneously plan and sabotage this ill-fated venture must have been a
severe test of his energy and ingenuity," wrote one of Kim Philby's biographers.1 The
venture was the clandestine attempt, begun in 1949, by the United States and Great
Britain to overthrow the pro-Soviet regime of Enver Hoxha through guerrilla-fomented
uprisings.
It ended in disaster, in part because the Russians had apparently been alerted by
Philby, the proper Englishman who had gone to all the right schools and penetrated the
highest ranks of British and American intelligence, though he had been a Soviet spy
since the age of 21.
Philby had moved to Washington the year before to act as the British Secret
Intelligence Service (SIS} liaison to the CIA. In that capacity he served as a co-director
of the CIA-SIS task force engaged in planning the Albanian operation. The choice had
fallen upon Albania because it was regarded as the most vulnerable of the socialist
states, the smallest and the weakest, not sharing a border with the Soviet Union, isolated
between a US-controlled Greece and a Yugoslavia that was a renegade from the Soviet
bloc. Moreover, a recent agreement between the Soviet Union and Albania involved aid
for Albania in return for a Soviet right to build a submarine base with direct access to
the Mediterranean.2 By the rules and logic of the cold-war board game, this was a move
the United States was obliged to thwart.

55
indulged in by the motley emigres could have contributed to the fiasco. Philby, referring
to the CIA-SIS task force members' habit of poking fun at Albanians, wrote: "Even in
our more serious moments, we Anglo-Saxons never forgot that our agents were just
down from the trees."9
So lax was security that New York Times correspondent Cyrus I.. Sulzberger
filed several dispatches from the Mediterranean area touching upon the intervention
which required virtually no reading between the lines.10 (The articles carried no
attention-grabbing headlines, there was no public comment about them from
Washington, no reporters asked government officials any embarrassing questions ...
ergo: a "non-event" for Americans.)
Despite one failure after another, and without good reason to expect anything
different in the future, the operation continued until the spring of 1953, resulting in the
death or imprisonment of hundreds of men. It was not simply the obsession with
chopping off one of Stalin's fingers. Professional prestige and careers had been invested,
a visible success was needed to "recoup past losses" and "justify earlier decisions".11
And the men who were being lost were, after all, only Albanians, who spoke not a word
of the Queen's English, and did not yet walk upright properly.
There was, however, the danger of the action escalating into conflict with the
Soviet Union. The Soviets did in fact send some new fighter planes to Albania,
presumably in the hope that they could shoot down the foreign aircraft making drops.12
The operation could not fail to remind Stalin, Hoxha, and the entire socialist bloc of
another Western intervention 30 years earlier in the Soviet Union. It could only serve to
make them yet more "paranoid" about Western intentions and convince them to turn the
screw of internal security yet tighter. Indeed, every now and again over the ensuing
years, Hoxha mentioned the American and British "invasion" and used it to justify his
policy of isolation.13
In the early 1960s, Hoxha himself did what the CIA and SIS had failed to do: He
pulled Albania out of the Soviet orbit. The Albanian leader purged pro-Soviet officials
in his government and aligned his country with China. There was no military retaliation
on the part of the USSR. In the mid-1970s, Hoxha forsook China as well.

7. Eastern Europe 1948-1956
Operation Splinter Factor

Jozef Swiatlo surfaced at a press conference in Washington on 28 September
1954. Swiatlo was a Pole; he had been a very important one, high up in the Ministry of
Public Security, the secret police. The story went that he had defected in West Berlin
the previous December while on a shopping trip, and now the State Department was
presenting him to the world to clear up the mystery of the Fields, the American citizens
who had disappeared in 1949. Swiatlo revealed that Noel Field and his wife Herta had
been arrested in Hungary, and that brother Hermann Field had suffered the same fate in
Poland at the hands of Swiatlo himself, all in connection with the trial of a leading
Hungarian Communist. The State Department had already dispatched strong letters to
the governments of Hungary and Poland.1
There is a more expanded and more sinister version of the Jozef Swiatlo story.
This story has Swiatlo seeking to defect to the British in Warsaw back in 1948 at a time
when he was already in his high security position. The British, for various reasons,

56
turned his case over to the United States and, at the request of Allen Dulles, Swiatlo was
told to remain at his post until further notice.
At this time Dulles was not yet Director of the CIA, but was a close consultant
to the Agency, had his own men in key positions, and was waiting only until November
for Thomas Dewey to win the presidential election and appoint him to the top position.
(Harry Truman's surprising re-election postponed this for four years, but Dulles did
become Deputy Director in 1951.)
Noel Field, formerly a State Department Foreign Service Officer, was a long-
time Communist fellow-traveler, if not a party member in the United States or Europe.
During the Second World War, his path converged with Dulles's in intrigue-filled
Switzerland. Dulles was an OSS man, Field the representative of the Unitarian Church
in Boston helping refugees from Nazi occupation. Field made it a point particularly to
help Communist refugees, of which there were many inasmuch as Communists were
second only to Jews on the German persecution list. The OSS aided the operation
financially; the Communists in turn were an excellent source of information about
happenings in Europe of interest to Washington and its allies.
Toward the end of the war, Field induced Dulles to provide American support
for a project which placed agents in various European countries to prepare the way for
the advancing Allied troops. The men chosen by Field, unsurprisingly, were all
Communists and their placement in certain Eastern European countries helped them to
get their hands on the reins of power long before non-Communist forces were able to
regroup and organize themselves.
It could be concluded from this that Allen Dulles had been duped. Moreover, the
OSS, under Dulles's direction and again with Field involved, had financed the
publication of a clandestine newspaper inside Germany; anti-fascist and left-wing, the
paper was called Neues Deutschland, and immediately upon liberation became the
official newspaper of the East German Communist Party.
After the war these incidents served as jokes which intelligence services of both
East and West could and did appreciate. Before long, the joke fell heavily upon Noel
Field.
In 1949 when Field visited Poland he was regarded with grave suspicion by
Polish authorities. He was seen to have worked during the war in a position which could
easily have been a front for Western espionage, a position which brought him into
regular contact with senior Communist Party members; and he had, after all, worked
closely with Allen Dulles, famous already as a spymaster, and the brother of John Foster
Dulles, prominent in Washington official circles and already making his calls for the
"liberation" of the Soviet bloc nations.
At the time of Field's arrival in Poland, Jozef Swiatlo was looking to implicate
Jakub Berman, a high party and state official whom Swiatlo was suspicious of and
detested. It was his failure to convince the Polish president to act against Berman that
reportedly drove Swiatlo to try to defect the year before. When Noel Field wrote to
Berman asking his help in obtaining a job in Eastern Europe, Swiatlo learned of the
letter and saw his chance to nail Berman.
But first Noel Field had to be established as an American spy. Given the
circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction, that would not be too difficult for a
man of Swiatlo's high position and low character. Of course, if Field really was working
with US intelligence, Swiatlo couldn't very well be exposing him since the Polish
security officer was now himself an American agent. Accordingly, he sent his first
message to the CIA, describing his plan about Berman and Field and the harm it could
do to the Communist Party in Poland. He concluded with: "Any objections?"

57
Allen Dulles had none. His reaction to Swiatlo's message was one of pleasure
and amusement. The time had come to settle accounts with Noel Field. More
importantly, Dulles saw that Swiatlo, using Noel Field, "the American spy", as a
bludgeon could knock off countless leading Communist officials in the Soviet bloc. It
could put the whole of the bloc into a state of acute paranoia and set off a wave of
repression and Stalinist tyranny that could eventually lead to uprisings. Dulles called his
plan: Operation Splinter Factor.
Thus it was that Jozef Swiatlo was directed to find spies everywhere in Eastern
Europe. He would uncover American plots and British plots, "Trotskyist" conspiracies
and "Titoist" conspiracies. He would report to Soviet secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria
himself that at the center of the vast network was a man named Noel Haviland Field.
Field was arrested and wound up in a prison in Hungary, as did his wife Herta
when she came looking for him. And when his brother Hermann Field sought to track
down the two of them, he met the same fate in Poland.
Swiatlo was in a unique position to carry out Operation Splinter Factor. Not only
did he have the authority and command, he had the files on countless Communist Party
members in the bloc countries. Any connection they had had with Noel Field, anything
that Field had done, could be interpreted to show the hand of American intelligence or
an act of real or potential subversion of the socialist states. The Soviets, and Stalin
himself, were extremely interested in the "Fieldists". Noel Field had known almost
everyone who was anyone in the Soviet bloc.
just in case the level of paranoia in the infant, insecure governments of Eastern
Europe was not high enough, a CIA double agent would "corroborate" a vital piece of
information, or introduce the right rumor at the right time; or the Agency's Radio Free
Europe would broadcast certain tantalizing, seemingly-coded messages; or the CIA
would direct the writing of letters from "East European expatriates" in the United States
to leading Communists in their homelands, containing just the bit of information, or the
phrase, carefully designed to lift the eyebrows of a security officer.